Marketing orientation: The marketing orientation describes the mindset in which a man perpetally molds himself into society's image in order to fit the expected norms of society. He sees the world as a marketplace, where new symbolizes good and desirous, wheras old becomes ugly and useless to him. Fromm described this mindset as saying, "new is beautiful," as opposed to the historical mindset which has been one of keeping and maintaining possessions for later, commodity - oriented use: "old is beautiful."
Marketing characters exhibit signs of extreme conformity and solve their problems as if they were simply manifestations of the market. These people look for mates as commodities to be scrutinized for positive traits which may have little to do with love, and create barriers between themselves and others defined by abstractions such as religiosity, monetary value and social status. Families which own or manage businesses or encourage conformity and a scholastic focus on the job market - that is, most families in industirialized nations today - tend to create marketing characters. This personality, Fromm said, only started to emerge with contemporary society and its focus on marketability.
Productive orientation: This is, to fromm, the "man without a mask." He has found a legitimate solution to life, and that is to learn to contintually relate and become one with the world and its dilemmas, thus solving the problem of his disassociation from nature and his knowledge of the self. He also draws a relation to his "spontaneous" character which he described in "Escape from Freedom," who is not chained by the artificial and unrealistic compulsions of social domination, but finds himself rationally and personally responding to problems. This character has managed to escape the confines of dogmatic, staic ideology and finds his ideas continually challenged and is not afraid to change them. By becoming one with his ideas, their health becomes more relevant, and he no longer feels as if they are a static possession, but a tool that if seen to be false must be revised. The productive individual has also learned to love truly; while other personalities find awys to escape love and distance themselves, the productive man has no fear of accepting things and peopel for who they are and loving them accordingly. He recognizes that to love one person you must love all, because the essential nature of man is by and large universal; if one loves a person for not being racist and they wake up tomorrow, has that love truly been real?
The productive man is also the man of the future; in Fromm's eye's he is Marx's new man. Because he can become one with the external world and his fellow man, he finds relating to others and relieving alienation a simple process that simply follows in his nature. By calling him the "man without a mask," Fromm is in fact saying that at heart we are all socialists, or even communists!